House committee to delve into West explosion

State lawmakers will begin the first formal inquiry Wednesday into the catastrophic explosion at the West Fertilizer Co. with invited testimony from officials representing eight state agencies .

According to a public notice, the House Homeland Security and Public Safety committee selected agencies that “may have jurisdiction or oversight in the regulation, operation, security, licensing, inspection, reporting, location, and any other relevant information relating to the operation of facilities such as the fertilizer plant involved in the West, Texas disaster as it relates to public safety.”

Those agencies are: the Department of Public Safety, the Texas Division of Emergency Management, the Emergency Management Council, the Office of the Texas State Chemist, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the Texas Department of Agriculture, the Department of State Health Services and the Texas State Fire Marshall’s Office.

In advance of the meeting, the Democratic group Progress Texas, noted that Gov. Rick Perry “has said the state is not to blame for the explosion at West, suggesting that no regulations could have prevented the tragic accident. Perry’s suggestion runs counter to investigations by existing news reports that have found that lax state and federal regulation allowed for 270 tons of ammonium nitrate to go unreported to the Department of State Health Services – 1,350 times the amount that normally triggers an alert.”

Last week, Committee chairman Joe Pickett, D-El Paso, said the hearing “isn’t a finger-pointing exercise. There are so many questions that members have, that the public has. I’m hoping to get an understanding of how many of these facilities there are. Do we need to inventory them? Are there some more dangerous than others?”